Patheos blog
March 6, 2019
By Melinda Selmys
It was after the birth of my sixth child, my family had taken my other children so that I could rest and recover with the baby, and my husband was binge drinking. For days he raged about the house while I tried to take care of a newborn. When he was closer to sober, he wanted to argue about Church sexual teaching. When he was drunk enough the pretext of theological discussion fell away and he stated his demands simply: “Suck my dick.”
I was seven days postpartum, still sore from giving birth, my hormones were on a roller coaster, and I was isolated and terrified. I begged him to stop drinking but he insisted that this was impossible. He was using alcohol to deal with the unbearable sexual frustration that Catholic sexual teaching was inflicting on him, and that I was forcing him to endure by my insistence on staying faithful to the teaching.
Finally, unable to deal with the rage and the drinking, I broke down and had sex with him. I chose a position that I hoped wouldn’t cause any kind of injury and I did it “naturally” in order to avoid mortal sin.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.